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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Teenage movie fans can watch the stars of the execrable "Bad Boys II" leer over a corpse's breasts, but the all-powerful movie ratings board probably won't allow Americans to see the Italian master Bertolucci's new film intact.
Sep 5, 2003 | 1973: A major American distributor, United Artists, releases Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" with an X rating.
2003: At the Venice Film Festival, Bertolucci announces that his new film, "The Dreamers," will probably have to be cut for its American release to satisfy the contract he signed with the U.S. distributor, Fox Searchlight Pictures, to deliver an R-rated film.
That juxtaposition is an easy irony but a real one -- a mark of how society has changed in 30 years, of the growing conservatism of the film industry, a sign of how American movie audiences are infantilized when it comes to sex, and one more example of why it's past time to ditch the corrupt ratings system of the Motion Picture Association of America.
When I heard a few years back that Bertolucci was directing the film version of Gilbert Adair's "The Holy Innocents," I was ecstatic. Adair's book is a rewrite of Jean Cocteau's "Les Enfants Terribles," a hothouse ménage between a French brother and sister and their American friend set in a Paris apartment in the spring of 1968. The book spans from February, when Henri Langois is dismissed as the curator of the Cinémathèque, to the riots of May. Impossibly florid and yet a controlled, conscious act of homage swimming in literary and cinematic allusion, the book is a mix of movies, sex and revolution. And it seemed ideal for Bertolucci who, as he did in "The Conformist" and "Last Tango," has always been able to locate the rot inside lust and, as he did in "Before the Revolution," understands the tension between the sensual and the political.
But "The Dreamers," which reportedly includes male nudity, incest between siblings, and sex among its teenage characters, is to be distributed in America by Twentieth Century Fox's "specialty" division, Fox Searchlight, and like most directors working for a major studio, Bertolucci had to sign a contract obligating him to bring the film in at an R rating.
The reasons for that are largely economic. Teenagers are the mainstay of the movie audience. They will have easier access to an R film than an NC-17 film. (In fact, the New York Times recently reported that studios are now pressuring directors to bring certain films in at PG-13 to ensure an even bigger audience.) Many networks and newspapers refuse ads for NC-17 films, and some theaters won't book them. Worse for studios, which now make a large percentage of their profits from video rentals, Blockbuster -- the leading video chain in the country -- will not stock NC-17 films.
Fox Searchlight is not commenting on the potential ratings situation at this time.
The potential economic liabilities of an NC-17 wouldn't seem to be particularly strong in the case of "The Dreamers." Teenagers are not going to be flocking to the new Bernardo Bertolucci film. And the audience that might be interested in going will be less inclined to do so if they know that what they will see is a compromised version. The smartest thing that Fox Searchlight could do, both as a matter of business and good public relations for themselves, would be to agree to release the film with whatever rating the MPAA classification board slaps on it. That would be seen as a gutsy move for a mainstream studio, raising its profile among filmmakers and critics and art-house moviegoers. And it would very likely mean a bigger profit for the film from the combination of word of mouth and American moviegoers grateful that they are getting to see the version of the film Europeans will see. Alternatively, as Miramax did when its parent company Disney got cold feet about releasing "Dogma," Fox Searchlight could sell the movie to an independent distributor like Lions Gate or Good Machine, which could release it unrated. That's what the latter did with "Y Tu Mamá También" and found themselves with a hit.
